I am grateful for the
invitation to this conference, and for the sensitive way in which the
organisers responded to my comments on the intial outline of the programme. I
am aware that fresh interpretations of Paul, including my own, have caused
controversy in evangelical circles, and particularly reformed circles. My own
name has been linked with proposals which have been variously dismissed,
scorned, vilified and anathematized. Having heard the papers yesterday morning
and afternoon I suggested to David Searle that I should take two hours not one
to say what needs to be said just now; but when I heard Tony Lane last night I
realised I would need, like Cardinal Seripando at Trent, two days to establish
my own orthodoxy. We shall see.

There are several different
agendas coming together at this point. The issue is sometimes treated as a
variation on old modernist controversies, at other times as a clash between a
Christian absolutism and a religious relativism, and at other times as a
variation on a perceived protestant/catholic divide (or even a
high-church/low-church divide), with the so-called new perspective focussing on
ecclesiology rather than soteriology and being condemned for so doing. And
that’s just the beginning. From time to time correspondents draw my attention
to various websites on which you can find scathing denunciations of me for
abandoning traditional protestant orthodoxy and puzzled rejoinders from people
who have studied my work and know that I’m not saying what many of my critics
say I’m saying. Go to amazon.com and look at the comments which anonymous
correspondents have appended to some of my books.

Faced with that kind of
problem, it would take a whole book to unpick the strands, to disentangle them
from other issues, to explain what the so-called New Perspective is and isn’t,
and to argue exegetically step by step for a particular reading of Paul.
Clearly I can’t do that here. What I shall do instead is to make two opening
remarks about my aim and method on the one hand and the problem of the New
Perspective on the other, and then to attempt once more to say briefly what I
think needs to be said about Paul and justification, sharpening up the issues
here and there.

First, as to aim and method.
When I began research on Paul, thirty years ago this autumn, my aim was to
understand Paul in general and Romans in particular better than I had done
before, as part of my heartfelt and lifelong commitment to scripture, and to
the sola scriptura principle, believing that the better the church
understands and lives by scripture the better its worship, preaching and common
life will be. I was conscious of thereby standing methodologically in the
tradition of the reformers, for whom exegesis was the lifeblood of the church,
and who believed that scripture should stand over against all human traditions.
I have not changed this aim and this method, nor do I intend to. Indeed, the
present controversy, from my own point of view, often appears to me in terms of
a battle for the Reformers’ aims and methods – going back to scripture
over against all human tradition – against some of their theological positions
(and, equally, those of their opponents, since I believe that often both sides
were operating with mistaken understandings of Paul). I believe that Luther,
Calvin, and many of the others would tell us to read scripture afresh, with all
the tools available to us – which is after all what they did – and to treat
their own doctrinal conclusions as important but not as important as scripture
itself. That is what I have tried to do, and I believe I am honouring them
thereby.

Allow me, if you will, a moment
of autobiography, for reasons similar to those of Paul in Galatians 1 and 2. In
my early days of research, before Sanders had published Paul and Palestinian
Judaism in 1977 and long before Dunn coined the phrase ‘The New Perspective
on Paul’, I was puzzled by one exegetical issue in particular, which I here
oversimplify for the sake of summary. If I read Paul in the then standard
Lutheran way, Galatians made plenty of sense, but I had to fudge (as I could
see dozens of writers fudging) the positive statements about the Law in Romans.
If I read Paul in the Reformed way of which, for me, Charles Cranfield remains
the supreme exegetical exemplar, Romans made a lot of sense, but I had to fudge
(as I could see Cranfield fudging) the negative statements about the Law in
Galatians. For me then and now, if I had to choose between Luther and Calvin I
would always take Calvin, whether on the Law or (for that matter) the
Eucharist. But as I struggled this way and that with the Greek text of Romans
and Galatians, it dawned on me, I think in 1976, that a different solution was
possible. In Romans 10.3 Paul, writing about his fellow Jews, declares that
they are ignorant of the righteousness of God, and are seeking to establish
‘their own righteousness’. The wider context, not least 9.30–33, deals with the
respective positions of Jews and Gentiles within God’s purposes – and with a lot
more besides, of course, but not least that. Supposing, I thought, Paul meant
‘seeking to establish their own righteousness’, not in the sense of a moral
status based on the performance of Torah and the consequent accumulation
of a treasury of merit, but an ethnic status based on the possession
of Torah as the sign of automatic covenant membership? I saw at once that this
would make excellent sense of Romans 9 and 10, and would enable the positive
statements about the Law throughout Romans to be given full weight while making
it clear that this kind of use of Torah, as an ethnic talisman, was an abuse. I
sat up in bed that night reading through Galatians and saw that at point after
point this way of looking at Paul would make much better sense of Galatians, too,
than either the standard post-Luther readings or the attempted Reformed ones.

The reason I’m telling you this
is to show that I came to the position I still hold (having found it over the
years to be deeply rewarding exegetically right across Paul; I regard as
absolutely basic the need to understand Paul in a way which does justice to all
the letters, as well as to the key passages in individual ones) – that I came
to this position, not because I learned it from Sanders or Dunn, but because of
the struggle to think Paul’s thoughts after him as a matter of obedience to
scripture. This brings me to the complexity of the so-called New Perspective
and of my relationship to it.

When Sanders’s book was
published in 1977, I devoured it with both eagerness and puzzlement. Eagerness,
because his exposition of first-century Palestinian Judaism supported in all
kinds of ways the picture to which I had been coming through my reading of Paul
(I was not, then, well up in Judaism itself). Puzzlement, because when he came
to Paul Sanders seemed muddled and imprecise. This is partly, I now realise,
because he was not dealing with theology (and so seemed confused about basic
things like justification and salvation), but rather with religion, and
patterns of religion in particular. His agenda, there and elsewhere, included a
desire to make Christianity and Judaism less antithetical; in other words, to
take a large step away from the anti-Judaism of much Pauline scholarship. I
need hardly say that I never embraced either Sanders’s picture of Paul or the
relativistic agendas which seemed to be driving it. Indeed, for the next decade
much of what I wrote on Paul was in debate and disagreement with Sanders, not least
because his proposals lacked the exegetical clarity and rootedness which I
regarded and regard as indispensible. For me, the question has always been ‘But
does this make sense of the text?’, not ‘But will this fit into some abstract
scheme somewhere?’

Lots of those who joined the
Sanders bandwaggon, not least in America, did so because they shared his
post-Holocaust re-evaluation of Christian-Jewish relations, and the implicit
relativism which that engendered. I have spent considerable energy arguing against
this position, and explaining that Paul’s critique of Israel is not based on,
or productive of, anti-Judaism as such, still less anti-semitism, but involves
a far more delicately balanced and nuanced theology which cannot be reduced to
such slogans.

Likewise, when Jimmy Dunn added
his stones to the growing pile I found myself in both agreement and
disagreement with him. His proposal about the meaning of ‘works of the law’ in
Paul – that they are not the moral works through which one gains merit but the
works through which the Jew is defined over against the pagan – I regard as
exactly right. It has proved itself again and again in the detailed exegesis;
attempts to deny it have in my view failed. But Dunn, like Sanders (and like
some other New Perspetive writers such as John Ziesler) has not, I think, got
to the heart of Paul. Again, much of my writing on Paul over the last twenty
years at least has been in at least implicit dialogue with him, and I find his
exposition of justification itself less than satisfying. For one thing, he
never understands what I take to be Paul’s fundamental covenant theology; for
another, his typically protestant anti-sacramentalism leads him to miss the
point of Romans 6. I could go on.

I say all this to make it clear
that there are probably almost as many ‘New Perspective’ positions as there are
writers espousing it – and that I disagree with most of them. Where I agree is
as follows. It is blindingly obvious when you read Romans and Galatians –
though you would never have known this from any of the theologians we discussed
yesterday – that virtually whenever Paul talks about justification he does so
in the context of a critique of Judaism and of the coming together of Jew and
Gentile in Christ. As an exegete determined to listen to scripture rather than
abstract my favourite bits from it I cannot ignore this. The only notice that
most mainstream theology has taken of this context is to assume that the Jews
were guilty of the kind of works-righteousness of which theologians from
Augustine to Calvin and beyond have criticised their opponents; and, though
Sanders’s account of Judaism needs a lot more nuancing, I regard the New
Perspective’s challenge to this point as more or less established. What I miss
entirely in the Old Perspective, but find so powerfully in some modern Pauline
scholarship, is Paul’s sense of an underlying narrative, the story of God and
Israel, God and Abraham, God and the covenant people, and the way in which that
story came to its climax, as he says, ‘when the time had fully come’ with the
coming of Jesus the Messiah. How all this works out is still very controversial
within the New Perspective. But at these points, for good exegetical and
historical reasons, I find myself saying Here I Stand.

What has happened, then? Like
America looking for a new scapegoat after the collapse of the Cold War, and
seizing on the Islamic world as the obvious target, many conservative writers,
having discovered themselves in possession of the Pauline field after the
liberals got tired of it, have looked around for new enemies. Here is something
called the New Perspective; it seems to be denying some of the things we have
normally taught; very well, let us demonize it, lump its proponents together,
and nuke them from a great height. That has not made a pretty sight. Speaking
as one of those who is regularly thus carpet-bombed, what I find frustrating is
the refusal of the traditionalists to do three things: first, to differentiate
the quite separate types of New Perspective; second, to engage in the actual
exegetical debates upon which the whole thing turns, instead of simply
repeating a Lutheran or similar line as though that settled matters; and third,
to recognise that some of us at least are brothers in Christ who have come to
the positions we hold not because of some liberal, modernist or relativist
agenda but as a result of prayerful and humble study of the text which is and
remains our sole authority. Of course, prayer and humility before the text do
not guarantee exegetical success. We all remain deeply flawed at all levels.
But that is precisely my point. If I am simul iustus et peccator, the
church, not least the church as the scripture-reading community, must be ecclesia
catholica semper reformanda. Like Calvin, we must claim the right to stand
critically within a tradition. To deny either of these would be to take a large
step towards precisely the kind of triumphalism against which the Reformers
themselves would severely warn us. But if we are siblings in Christ there are,
I think, appropriate ways of addressing one another and of speaking about one
another, and I regret that these have not always characterized the debate.

There is much more that I could
say under both these initial headings, but this must suffice for now. I turn to
what I regard as the central issues around which the debate ought to turn.

Understanding Righteousness
in Paul: The Central Issues

Let me, as a good Calvinist,
offer you five points about Paul which I regard as crucial in the present
debates, justification itself being the fifth. There are of course many other
things vital to Paul, not least Christology, about which I have written much;
all of these need careful integration into the picture, for which now is not
the time. Ideally, one would walk slowly round the piece of the Pauline jigsaw
labelled ‘justification’, commenting on each other piece of the jigsaw and
noting how justification fits into it. Obvious examples, each of which is dear
to my heart and most of which I have written about elsewhere, are the cross,
the resurrection, the spirit, the Jewish law, union with Christ, the
sacraments, election, and love. Please do not think that because there is no
time to expound any of these I am forgetting or marginalising them. And, again
because of time, I simply state each point in the barest outline, relying on my
other works, not least my recent Romans commentary, to back me up with details.

1. The Gospel

I begin where Romans begins –
with the gospel. My proposal is this. When Paul refers to ‘the gospel’, he is
not referring to a system of salvation, though of course the gospel implies and
contains this, nor even to the good news that there now is a way of
salvation open to all, but rather to the proclamation that the crucified Jesus
of Nazareth has been raised from the dead and thereby demonstrated to be both
Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true Lord. ‘The gospel’ is not ‘you can be
saved, and here’s how’; the gospel, for Paul, is ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’.

This announcement draws together
two things, in derivation and confrontation. First, Paul is clearly echoing the
language of Isaiah: the message announced by the herald in Isaiah 40 and 52 has
at last arrived. Saying ‘Jesus is Messiah and Lord’ is thus a way of saying,
among other things, ‘Israel’s history has come to its climax’; or ‘Isaiah’s
prophecy has come true at last’. This is powerfully reinforced by Paul’s
insistence, exactly as in Isaiah, that this heraldic message reveals God’s
righteousness, that is, God’s covenant faithfulness, about which more anon.
Second, since the word ‘gospel’ was in public use to designate the message that
Caesar was the Lord of the whole world, Paul’s message could not escape being
confrontative: Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord, and at his name, not that of the
Emperor, every knee shall bow. This aspect lies at the heart of what I have
called ‘the fresh perspective on Paul’, the discovery of a subversive political
dimension not as an add-on to Paul’s theology but as part of the inner meaning
of ‘gospel’, ‘righteousness’, and so on.

For Paul, the announcement or
proclamation of Jesus as Lord was itself the ‘word of God’ which carried power.
Putting together the various things he says about the preaching of the gospel,
the word, and the work of the Spirit, we arrive at the following position: when
Paul comes into a town and declares that Jesus is Lord, no doubt explaining who
Jesus was, the fact and significance of his death and resurrection, and so on,
then the Spirit is at work, mysteriously, in the hearts and minds of the
listeners, so that, when some of them believe in Jesus, Paul knows that this is
not because of his eloquence or clever argument but because the announcement of
Jesus as Lord functions as (in later technical language) the means of grace, the
vehicle of the Spirit. And, since the gospel is the heraldic proclamation of
Jesus as Lord, it is not first and foremost a suggestion that one might like to
enjoy a new religious experience. Nor is it even the take-it-or-leave-it offer
of a way to salvation. It is a royal summons to submission, to obedience, to
allegiance; and the form that this submission and obedient allegiance takes is
of course faith. That is what Paul means by ‘the obedience of faith’. Faith
itself, defined conveniently by Paul as belief that Jesus is Lord and that God
raised him from the dead, is the work of the Spirit, accomplished through the
proclamation. ‘No-one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.’ But
this already jumps ahead to my fourth point, and before we get there we must
take in the second and third.

2. The Righteousness of God

The second point concerns the
phrase ‘the righteousness of God’, dikaiosune theou. I became convinced
many years ago, and time and exegesis have confirmed this again and again, that
Paul always uses this phrase to denote, not the status which God’s people have
from him or in his presence, but the righteousness of God himself. This is not
to say that there is no such thing as a righteous status held by believers.
There is. It is to deny that this is the referent of Paul’s phrase dikaiosune
theou. Here a Pauline exegesis rooted in Paul’s own understanding of Jewish
scripture and tradition must challenge the fuzzy thinking that, listening to
yesterday’s papers, I discover characterised most of the great, but basically
Latin-speaking, theologians.

The main argument for taking dikaiosune
theou to denote an aspect of the character of God himself is the way in
which Paul is summoning up a massive biblical and intertestamental theme, found
not least in Isaiah 40—55 which I have argued elsewhere is vital for him. God’s
dikaiosune, his tsedaqah, is that aspect of his character because
of which, despite Israel’s infidelity and consequent banishment, God will
remain true to the covenant with Abraham and rescue her none the less. This
‘righteousness’ is of course a form of justice; God has bound himself to the
covenant, or perhaps we should say God’s covenant is binding upon him, and
through this covenant he has promised not only to save Israel but also,
thereby, to renew creation itself. The final flourish of Isaiah 55 is not to be
forgotten, especially when we come to Romans 8. Righteousness, please note, is
not the same thing as salvation; God’s righteousness is the reason why
he saves Israel.

But this covenant-fidelity,
this covenant-justice, is not purely a matter of salvific activity. As Daniel 9
makes clear, it is a matter of God’s severe justice upon covenant-breaking
Israel, and only then a matter of God’s merciful rescue of penitent Israel.
This is why the gospel – the announcement that Jesus Christ is Lord – contains
within itself, as Paul insists in Romans 2.16, the message of future judgment as
well as the news of salvation. What God’s righteousness never becomes, in the
Jewish background which Paul is so richly summing up, is an attribute which is
passed on to, reckoned to, or imputed to, his people. Nor does Paul treat it in
this way. What we find, rather, is that Paul is constantly (especially in
Romans, where all but one of the occurrences of the phrase are found) dealing
with the themes which from Isaiah to 4 Ezra cluster together with the question
of God’s righteousness: how is God to be faithful to Israel, to Abraham, to the
world? How will the covenant be fulfilled, and who will be discovered to be
God’s covenant people when this happens?

This is precisely what Romans
9–11 is about, not as an appendix to the letter but as its proper climax. And
this is anticipated in several earlier parts of the letter conveniently
screened out by the great tradition in its quest for a non-Jewish soteriology,
not least the second half of Romans 2, the first nine verses of Romans 3, and
the fact that in Romans 4 Paul is demonstrably arguing about God’s faithfulness
to the Abrahamic covenant, not simply using Abraham as an example of someone
justified by faith.

Part of the tragedy of
reformation exegesis, not least Lutheran exegesis, is that this entire line of
thought was screened out. Thus even Käsemann, who sees clearly that dikaiosune
theou must refer to God’s own righteousness, cannot allow that it has
anything to do with the covenant, but insists, against the evidence, that it
has become a technical term denoting ‘God’s salvation-creating power’, with a
cosmic reach. He fails to notice a point I have come to regard as central and
crucial: that the covenant with Israel was always designed to be God’s means of
saving and blessing the entire cosmos. You get the cosmic reach, as in Genesis
12, as in Isaiah 40—55, as in the Psalms, as in Romans 8, as in 1 Corinthians
15, not by bypassing the covenant but by fulfilling it.

What then can we say about the
status of ‘righteous’ which, in many Pauline passages, is enjoyed by the people
of God in Christ? For Paul, there is a clear distinction. God’s own
righteousness is dikaiosune theou. The status of ‘righteous’ which
people enjoy as a result of God’s action in Christ and by the Spirit is, in
Philippians 3.9, he ek theou dikaiosune, the righteous status which is
‘from God’. Ignoring this distinction, and translating dikaiosune theou
as ‘a righteousness from God’ or something like that, makes nonsense of several
passages, most noticebly Romans 3.21–26 (as, for instance, in the appalling and
self-contradictory NIV!), where the great theme is the way in which God has
been faithful to the covenant, the astonishing way whereby all alike, Jewish
sinners and Gentile sinners, are welcomed, redeemed, justified.

You can see this most clearly
if you remember the context of the Jewish lawcourt which forms the background
for Paul’s forensic use of the dikaiosune theme. Despite some odd recent
attempts to deny this, if you want to understand forensic justification you
must go to the law-court and find how the metaphor works. In the Jewish
lawcourt Paul would have known, there is no Director of Public Prosecutions;
there is a judge, with a plaintiff and a defendant appearing before him. When
the case has been heard, the judge finds in favour of one party and against the
other. Once that has happened, the vindicated party possesses the status
‘righteous’ – not itself a moral statement, we note, but a statement of how
things stand in terms of the now completed lawsuit. As someone said to me
yesterday, it all depends what you mean by ‘righteous’. But this status of
righteousness has nothing to do with the righteousness of the judge. For the
judge to be righteous, it is necessary that he try the case fairly, refuse
bribes or other favouritism, uphold the law, and take special note for the
helpless, the widows, and so on. When either the plaintiff or the defendant is
declared ‘righteous’ at the end of the case, there is no sense that in either
case the judge’s own righteousness has been passed on to them, by
imputation, impartation, or any other process. What they have is a status of
‘righteous’ which comes from the judge. Let me stress, in particular,
that when the judge finds in favour of one party or the other, he quite
literally makes the righteous; because ‘righteous’ at this point is not
a word denoting moral character, but only and precisely the status that you
have when the court has found in your favour. If this had been kept in mind in
earlier centuries a great deal of heartache and puzzle might have been avoided.

What then about the ‘imputed
righteousness’ about which we are to hear an entire paper this afternoon? This
is fine as it stands; God does indeed ‘reckon righteousness’ to those who
believe. But this is not, for Paul, the righteousness either of God or of
Christ, except in a very specialised sense to which I shall return. There are
only two passages which can be invoked in favour of the imputed righteousness
being that of God or Christ. The first proves too much, and the second not
enough. The first is 1 Corinthians 1.30f., where Paul says that Christ has
become for us wisdom from God, and righteousness, sanctification and
redemption. Wisdom is the main point he is making, and the other three nouns
come in as a way of saying ‘and everything else as well’. ‘Yea, all I need, in
thee to find, O Lamb of God, I come’; that line sums it up well. I doubt if
this will sustain the normal ‘imputation’ theology, because it would seem to
demand equal air time for the imputation of wisdom, sanctification and
redemption as well. The second passage is 2 Corinthians 5.21, which as I have
argued elsewhere is not, as a matter of good exegesis, a statement of
soteriology but of apostolic vocation. The entire passage is about the way in
which Paul’s new covenant ministry, through the death and resurrection of
Jesus, is in fact God’s appointed means for establishing and maintaining the
church. ‘So that we might become God’s righteousness in him’ means that in
Christ those who are called to be apostolic preachers actually embody God’s own
covenant faithfulness. I do not expect to convince you by this microcomsic
summary of the point, but I submit that it deserves careful exegetical
consideration, not dismissing with a wave of the hand and a reference to
Brother Martin.

Is there then no ‘reckoning of
righteousness’ in, for instance, Romans 5.14–21? Yes, there is; but my case is
that this is not God’s own righteousness, or Christ’s own righteousness, that
is reckoned to God’s redeemed people, but rather the fresh status of ‘covenant
member’, and/or ‘justified sinner’, which is accredited to those who are in
Christ, who have heard the gospel and responded with ‘the obedience of faith’.
But this, too, is pushing towards my fifth point, and I must proceed with the
third.

3. Final Judgment According
to Works

The third point is remarkably
controversial, seeing how well founded it is at several points in Paul. Indeed,
listening to yesterday’s papers, it seems that there has been a massive
conspiracy of silence on something which was quite clear for Paul (as indeed
for Jesus). Paul, in company with mainstream second-Temple Judaism, affirms
that God’s final judgment will be in accordance with the entirety of a life led
– in accordance, in other words, with works. He says this clearly and
unambiguously in Romans 14.10–12 and 2 Corinthians 5.10. He affirms it in that
terrifying passage about church-builders in 1 Corinthians 3. But the main
passage in question is of course Romans 2.1–16.

This passage has often been read
differently. We heard yesterday that Augustine had problems with it (perhaps
the only thing in common between Augustine and E. P. Sanders). That is hardly
surprising; here is the first statement about justification in Romans, and lo
and behold it affirms justification according to works! The doers of the law,
he says, will be justified (2.13). Shock, horror; Paul cannot (so many have
thought) have really meant it. So the passage has been treated as a
hypothetical position which Paul then undermines by showing that nobody can
actually achieve it; or, by Sanders for instance, as a piece of unassimilated
Jewish preaching which Paul allows to stand even though it conflicts with other
things he says. But all such theories are undermined by exegesis itself, not
least by observing the many small but significant threads that stitch Romans 2
into the fabric of the letter as a whole. Paul means what he says. Granted, he
redefines what ‘doing the law’ really means; he does this in chapter 8, and
again in chapter 10, with a codicil in chapter 13. But he makes the point most
compactly in Philippians 1.6: he who began a good work in you will bring it to
completion on the day of Christ Jesus. The ‘works’ in accordance with which the
Christian will be vindicated on the last day are not the unaided works of the
self-help moralist. Nor are they the performance of the ethnically distinctive
Jewish boundary-markers (sabbath, food-laws and circumcision). They are the
things which show, rather, that one is in Christ; the things which are produced
in one’s life as a result of the Spirit’s indwelling and operation. In this
way, Romans 8.1–17 provides the real answer to Romans 2.1–16. Why is there now
‘no condemnation’? Because, on the one hand, God has condemned sin in the flesh
of Christ (let no-one say, as some have done, that this theme is absent in my
work; it was and remains central in my thinking and my spirituality); and, on
the other hand, because the Spirit is at work to do, within believers, what the
Law could not do – ultimately, to give life, but a life that begins in the
present with the putting to death of the deeds of the body and the obedient
submission to the leading of the Spirit.

I am fascinated by the way in
which some of those most conscious of their reformation heritage shy away from
Paul’s clear statements about future judgment according to works. It is not
often enough remarked upon, for instance, that in the Thessalonian letters, and
in Philippians, he looks ahead to the coming day of judgment and sees God’s favourable
verdict not on the basis of the merits and death of Christ, not because like
Lord Hailsham he simply casts himself on the mercy of the judge, but on the
basis of his apostolic work. ‘What is our hope and joy and crown of boasting
before our Lord Jesus Christ at his royal appearing? Is it not you? For you are
our glory and our joy.’ (1 Thess. 3.19f.; cp. Phil. 2.16f.) I suspect that if
you or I were to say such a thing, we could expect a swift rebuke of ‘nothing
in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling’. The fact that Paul does not
feel obliged at every point to say this shows, I think, that he is not as
concerned as we are about the danger of speaking of the things he himself has
done – though sometimes, to be sure, he adds a rider, which proves my point,
that it is not his own energy but that which God gives and inspires within him
(1 Cor. 15.10; Col. 1.29). But he is still clear that the things he does in the
present, by moral and physical effort, will count to his credit on the last day,
precisely because they are the effective signs that the Spirit of the living
Christ has been at work in him. We are embarrassed about saying this kind of
thing; Paul clearly is not. What on earth can have happened to a sola
scriptura theology that it should find itself forced to screen out such
emphatic, indeed celebratory, statements?

The future verdict, when it is
positive, can be denoted by the verb ‘justify’. This carries its full forensic
sense, rooted in the ancient Jewish belief that the God of Israel, being the
creator of the world and also the God of justice, would finally put the world
to rights, in other words, that he would conduct a final Assize. On that day
there will be ‘glory, honour, immortality and the life of the age to come’ for
all who do right (Romans 2.7); in other words (verse 13) they will be
justified, declared to be in the right. This ought to have highlighted long ago
something which I believe has played too little part in discussions of Paul:
justification by faith, to which I shall come in a moment, is the anticipation
in the present of the justification which will occur in the future, and
gains its meaning from that anticipation. What Augustine lacked, what Luther
and Calvin lacked, what Regensburg lacked as a way of putting together the two
things it tried to hold on to, was Paul’s eschatological perspective, filled
out by the biblical fusion of covenantal and forensic categories. But before we
get there I want to address a question which Paul seldom touches explicitly but
about which we can reconstruct his thought quite accurately. This is just as
well because it has played an important role in protestant discussions of
soteriology and lies, I think, at the heart of today’s controversies about
justification.

4. Ordo Salutis

I refer to the question known
as ordo salutis. I take this phrase to refer to the lining up in
chronological sequence of the events which occur from the time when a human
being is outside the community of God’s people, stuck in idolatry and
consequent sin, through to the time when this same erstwhile sinner is fully
and finally saved. This question has been closely bound up with that of
justification, but I shall suggest in this and the next section that when Paul
uses the word and its cognates he has in mind one step only within that
sequence, and – critically, as you will see – not the one that the word has
been used to denote in much Christian dogmatics. At this point I am implicitly
in dialogue with a general trend, at least since the sixteenth century, to make
‘conversion’ and ‘justification’ more or less coterminous; a trend which has
been sped on its way when ‘conversion’ is understood as ‘the establishment of a
personal relationship with God’, and justification has been understood in a
‘relational’ sense with the meaning, not of membership in the covenant as in
the Old Testament, but of this personal relationship between the believer and
God.

I have already described how
Paul understands the moment when the gospel of Jesus as Lord is announced and
people come to believe it and obey its summons. Paul has a regular technical
term for this moment, and that technical term is neither ‘justification’ nor
‘conversion’ (though he can use the latter from time to time): the word in
question is ‘call’. ‘Consider your call’, he says to the Corinthians; ‘God
called me by his grace’, he says of himself. (This is why, incidentally,
Krister Stendahl’s suggestion that we should think of Paul’s ‘call’ as opposed
to his ‘conversion’ misses the point. For Paul, the word ‘call’ denoted not
merely a vocation to a particular task but also, more fundamentally, the
effective call of the gospel, applied by the Spirit to the individual heart and
life and resulting in a turning away from idolatry and sin and a lifelong
turning to God in Christ in believing allegiance.)

But if the ‘call’ is the
central event, the point at which the sinner turns to God, what comes before
and after? Paul himself has given the answer in Romans 8.29–30. Though he does
not often discuss such things, he here posits two steps prior to God’s ‘call’
through the gospel: God’s foreknowledge, and God’s marking-out-ahead-of-time,
the mark in question being the mark of the image of the Son. (I translate with
a paraphrase because of the problems associated with the word ‘destiny’ within
the word ‘predestination’.) These serve to emphasize, of course, the
sovereignty of God in the call itself, while Paul never engages with the
questions we want to ask about how precisely these things work out. (The
closest he comes is of course Romans 9, which simply restates the problem for
us; the parallel statement in Ephesians 1.3–14 is a celebration rather than an
explanation.)

But what matters for our
purposes even more is the question of what comes after the ‘call’.
‘Those he called, he also justified’. In other words, Paul uses ‘justify’ to
denote something other than, and logically subsequent to, what we have often
thought of as the moment of conversion, when someone who hasn’t before believed
the gospel is gripped by the word and the Spirit and comes to believe it, to
submit to Jesus as the risen Lord. Here is the central point in the controversy
between what I say about Paul and what the tradition, not least the protestant
tradition, has said. The tradition has used ‘justify’ and its cognates to
denote conversion, or at least the initial moment of the Christian life, and
has then debated broader and narrower definitions of what counts. My reading of
Paul indicates that he does not use the word like that; and my method, shared
with the reformers, insists that I prefer scripture itself to even the finest
traditions of interpretation. The fact that the Christian tradition has since
at least Augustine used the word ‘justify’ to mean ‘become a Christian’,
whether broadly or narrowly conceived, is neither here nor there. For Paul,
‘justification’ is something that follows on from the ‘call’ through
which a sinner is summoned to turn from idols and serve the living God, to turn
from sin and follow Christ, to turn from death and believe in the God who
raised Jesus from the dead. This points on to my fifth and final point, to
which we shall come shortly.

But before that, we note that
the final verb in Paul’s sequence is not ‘sanctified’. He would say that this
has already happened to all baptised believers (see 1 Corinthians 6.10f.). It
is ‘glorified’. Paul regards it as a fixed point that those who belong to the
Messiah by faith and baptism already share his glorious life, his rule over the
world, and that this rule, this glory, will one day be manifest. There is no
time to develop this here, but I note, as a point which much dogmatics has yet
to come to terms with, the fact that both Paul and John the Seer place great
emphasis not just on being saved, not just on being raised from the dead, but
on sharing the glorious rule of Jesus Christ as Lord over God’s new world. What
this role will consist of, who or what will be in subjection under this rule,
and so on, are questions which have fallen off most people’s radar screens. I
suggest it’s time we got them back on.

I hope I have said enough in
this short section to convince you of two things. First, my understanding of
how Paul supposed someone became a Christian is, I think, basically orthodox
and indeed reformed. God takes the initiative, based on his foreknowledge; the
preached word, through which the Spirit is at work, is the effective agent;
belief in the gospel, that is, believing submission to Jesus as the risen Lord,
is the direct result. My central point is that this isn’t what Paul is
referring to when he speaks of ‘justification’. But the substance of what
reformed theology, unlike Paul, has referred to by means of that word remains.
Faith is not something someone does as a result of which God decides to grant
them a new status or privilege. Becoming a Christian, in its initial moment, is
not based on anything that a person has acquired by birth or achieved by merit.
Faith is itself the first fruit of the Spirit’s call. And those thus called, to
return to Philippians 1.6, can be sure that the one who began a good work in
them will complete it at the day of Christ.

Second, it is simply not true,
as people have said again and again, that I deny or downplay the place of the
individual in favour of a corporate ecclesiology. True, I have reacted against
the rampant individualism of western culture, and have tried to insist on a
biblically rooted corporate solidarity in the body of Christ as an antidote to
it. But this in no way reduces the importance of every person being confronted
with the powerful gospel, and the need for each one to be turned around by it
from idols to God, from sin to holiness, and from death to life.

5. Justification

What then is ‘justification’,
if it is not conversion itself, not the establishment of a ‘relationship’
between a person and God, but something which is, at least logically,
consequent upon it? This is where confusion inevitably creeps in. I have argued
again and again that Paul uses dikaioo and its cognates to denote
something other than conversion itself; but several critics have not listened
to this, but have imagined that what I say about Paul’s use of the dikaioo
word-group is my proposed description of his theology of conversion; and they
have then charged me with all kinds of interesting heresies. To make this
clear, let me use instead a near-synonym, and speak here not of ‘justification’
but of ‘vindication’, recognising that this is itself controversial.

My proposal has been, and still
is, that Paul uses ‘vindication’ language, i.e. the dikaioo word-group,
when he is describing, not the moment when, or the process by which, someone
comes from idolatry, sin and death to God, Christ and life, but rather the
verdict which God pronounces consequent upon that event. dikaioo is
after all a declarative word, declaring that something is the case, rather than
a word for making something happen or changing the way something is. (Nor do we
need to get round this, as many have done, by saying that when God declares
something to be the case he brings it into being; that’s not the point here.)
And if we work backwards from the future vindication I spoke of earlier I
believe we can see what this declaration amounts to, and why Paul insisted on
it, especially in Romans and Galatians.

The language of vindication,
the dikaioo language, is as we’ve seen lawcourt language. Lawcourt
imagery is appropriate because God is the God of justice, who is bound to put
the world to rights, has promised to do so, and intends to keep his promises.
But the means by which he will do so, from Genesis 12 onwards, is through the
covenant he has made with Abraham; so that God’s covenant faithfulness on the
one hand, and God’s justice on the other, are not two quite different things,
but closely interlinked. Both are indicated, as we have seen, in the phrase dikaiosune
theou. When we talk of God’s vindication of someone we are talking about
God’s declaration, which appears as a double thing to us but I suspect a single
thing to Paul: the declaration (a) that someone is in the right (their sins
having been forgiven through the death of Jesus) and (b) that this person is a
member of the true covenant family, the family God originally promised to
Abraham and has now created through Christ and the Spirit, the single family
which consists equally of believing Jews and believing Gentiles. I submit that
this way of lining things up draws together the various categories which are
otherwise left untidily around the place: forensic in Luther versus adoption in
Calvin, lawcourt versus incorporative in Schweitzer and Sanders. Once you grasp
Paul’s underlying covenantal theology these dichotomies are overcome. My first
main point in this subsection is therefore that these two things – declaring
sinners to be in the right, with their sins forgiven, and declaring someone to
be a member of the single multi-ethnic covenant family – go very closely
together in Paul’s mind, and that to point out the importance of the latter
(belonging to the family) in passages like Romans 3 or Galatians 3 in no way
undermines the importance of the former (being one of those now declared ‘in
the right’ in God’s lawcourt). The underlying point here is crucial: the reason
God established the covenant with Abraham, according to scripture in general
and Paul in particular, was to undo the sin of Adam and its effects and thereby
to complete the project of the good creation itself. Thus God’s declaration of
forgiveness and his declaration of covenant membership are not ultimately two
different things. I freely grant that some of those who have highlighted the
importance of the Jew-plus-Gentile point in Paul have used it as a way of
saying that Paul is therefore not after all interested in God’s dealing with
sins and putting sinners in a right relation to himself. But just because
people draw false inferences one way, that is no reason why we should draw them
the other way. Let me take two obvious examples.

First, in Romans 3.21–31, by
anyone’s showing a vital and central passage, Paul makes what most commentators
in the reformation tradition regard as a strange shift in verse 29, when he
asks ‘Or is God the God of the Jews only?’ (Notice how the NIV, for instance,
omits the word ‘Or’.) If he had been talking all along simply about individual
sinners being put right with God, we should indeed regard this as a sudden
intrusion of ethnic questions. But he hasn’t. As chapter 4 will reveal, when we
allow it to play its full role, he has been talking about God’s faithfulness to
the covenant with Abraham, and about God’s creation of a single family from
both halves of sinful humanity. God’s declaring that sinners are now in a right
relation to himself and God’s declaring that believing Jews and believing
Gentiles belong in the same family are inextricably bound up with one another.

The same point emerges in
Galatians 2.11–21. Here, beyond cavil I think, the point of vindication is not
‘how someone becomes a Christian’ but the question of table-fellowship: with
whom may I, indeed must I, share table-fellowship? Peter’s action in separating
himself from Christian Gentiles was not implying that they needed to perform
moral good works; it was implying that they needed to become physically Jewish.
Paul’s argument against him was not to do with the mechanism of how people come
from being sinful idolaters to forgiven members of Christ’s people, but with
the equality within the people of God of all who believe the gospel, Jew and
Gentile alike. That controversy, indeed, dominates the entire letter in a way
that, alas, I think Martin Luther never saw (though specialists may correct
me).

What then is this vindication,
this dikaiosis? It is God’s declaration that a person is in the right;
that is, (a) that their sins have been forgiven, and (b) that they are part of
the single covenant family promised to Abraham. Notice that opening phrase:
God’s declaration that. Not ‘God’s bringing it about that’, but God’s
authoritative declaration of what is in fact the case. This is the point, of
course, where some have accused me of semi-Pelagianism. That might be so if I
intended to denote, with the word ‘justification’, what the tradition has
denoted. But I don’t. Paul, I believe, uses vindication/justification to denote
God’s declaration about someone, about (more specifically) the person who has
been ‘called’ in the sense described above. Vindication is not the same as
call.

And we now discover that this
declaration, this vindication, occurs twice. It occurs in the future, as we
have seen, on the basis of the entire life a person has led in the power of the
Spirit – that is, it occurs on the basis of ‘works’ in Paul’s redefined sense.
And, near the heart of Paul’s theology, it occurs in the present as an
anticipation of that future verdict, when someone, responding in believing
obedience to the ‘call’ of the gospel, believes that Jesus is Lord and that God
raised him from the dead. This is the point about justification by faith – to
revert to the familiar terminology: it is the anticipation in the present
of the verdict which will be reaffirmed in the future. Justification is
not ‘how someone becomes a Christian’. It is God’s declaration about the person
who has just become a Christian. And, just as the final declaration will
consist, not of words so much as of an event, namely, the resurrection of the
person concerned into a glorious body like that of the risen Jesus, so the
present declaration consists, not so much of words, though words there may be,
but of an event, the event in which one dies with the Messiah and rises to new
life with him, anticipating that final resurrection. In other words, baptism. I
was delighted yesterday to discover that not only Chrysostom and Augustine but
also Luther would here have agreed with me.

Traditional protestants may not
like this much, but it is I submit what Paul is saying. And I want you to
notice right away, before I draw some broader conclusions from all this, three
things that follow. First, Paul’s doctrine of what is true of those who are in
the Messiah does the job, within his scheme of thought, that the traditional
protestant emphasis on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness did within that
scheme. In other words, that which imputed righteousness was trying to insist
upon is, I think, fully taken care of in (for instance) Romans 6, where Paul
declares that what is true of the Messiah is true of all his people. Jesus was
vindicated by God as Messiah after his penal death; I am in the Messiah;
therefore I too have died and been raised. According to Romans 6, when God
looks at the baptised Christian he sees him or her in Christ. But Paul does not
say that he sees us clothed with the earned merits of Christ. That would of
course be the wrong meaning of ‘righteous’ or ‘righteousness’. He sees us
within the vindication of Christ, that is, as having died with Christ
and risen again with him. I suspect that it was the mediaeval
over-concentration on righteousness, on iustitia, that caused the protestant
reformers to push for imputed righteousness to do the job they rightly saw was
needed. But in my view they have thereby distorted what Paul himself was
saying.

Second, it emerges that
justification, for Paul, is not (in Sanders’s terminology) how one ‘gets in’ to
God’s people, but about God’s declaration that someone is in. In other
words, it is all about assurance – as we should have known from reading Romans.
I’ve said it before and this is the place to say it again: if we are thinking
Paul’s thoughts after him, we are not justified by faith by believing in
justification by faith. We are justified by faith by believing in the gospel
itself – in other words, that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the
dead. If, in addition, we believe in justification by faith itself, we believe
that, amazingly considering what God knows about us, we are now and for ever
part of the family to every member of which God says what he said to Jesus at
his baptism: you are my beloved child, with you I am well pleased.

Third, it follows at once that
justification is the original ecumenical doctrine. The first time we
meet justification, that is, in Galatians 2, it is about people from different
cultures and traditions sharing table-fellowship on the basis of nothing other
than their shared faith in Jesus as Messiah and Lord. Once we relocate
justification, moving it from the discussion of how people become Christians to
the discussion of how we know that someone is a Christian, we have a powerful
incentive to work together across denominational barriers. One of the sad
ironies of the last four hundred years is that, at least since 1541, we have
allowed disputes about how people become Christians – that which we thought was
denoted by the language of justification – to divide us, when the doctrine of
justification itself, urging us to unite across our cultural divides, went
unheard. Not that there are not large and important problems in ecumenical
relations. I am horrified at some of the recent Anglican/Roman statements, for
instance, and on things like the Papacy, purgatory, and the cult of saints
(especially Mary), I am as protestant as the next person, for (I take it) good
Pauline reasons. But justification by faith tells me that if my Roman neighbour
believes that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead then he or
she is a brother or sister, however much I believe them muddled, even
dangerously so, on other matters.

Conclusion

I have, I suspect, said enough
to put the cat among the pigeons, but not enough to get it back into its
basket. That will have to come, if at all, in question and answers. But let me
conclude with four brief propositions about the importance of taking at least
this version of the New Perspective seriously, and one flagrantly homiletic
plea.

First, to restate the point of
method. I remain committed to understanding Paul in his own right and his own
terms against all traditions about him, including my own. I remain convinced
that Luther and Calvin would say Amen to that point of principle. And I
believe, and have argued in my various exegetical works, that this reading of
Paul makes far more sense of his letters, in whole and in their various parts,
and in their mutual relations, than all other readings known to me. Part of
that exegetical task is to relate Paul to the Jewish world of his day, and this
reading I believe does that far better than the traditional one, though debates
naturally remain about many aspects of the Jewish context.

Second, this reading of Paul
allows fully for the challenge to each person to hear and believe the gospel
and live by it, while at the same time allowing fully also for three other
contexts, each of which is vitally important to Paul, to have their place.
These three other contexts are the cosmic, as in Romans 8; the ecclesiological,
as in his constant emphasis on the unity of Jew and Gentile in Christ; and the
political, as mentioned earlier. Many have tried to play these off against each
other; I believe they are instead mutually reinforcing. The united multi-ethnic
church is a sign of God’s healing and remaking of the cosmos and also thereby a
sign to Caesar and his followers that his attempted unification of the world is
a blasphemous parody. This is part of what Ephesians and Colossians are all
about, though that is another story. It is also, I believe, a point in urgent
need of emphasis today.

Third, this new perspective
reading of Paul enables us to understand, crucially for some current debates in
my church at least, why Paul is very tolerant of differences on some points
(particularly food, drink and holy days) and completely intolerant on others
(particularly sexual ethics). The boundary lines he insists on blurring (in, for
instance, Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8) are precisely those between different
ethnic communities, particularly Jew and Gentile. The boundary lines he draws
the more firmly are those between the holy lifestyle required of those who have
died and been raised with the Messiah and the unholy lifestyle of those who
behave as if they had not, but were still living ‘in the flesh’. This, too, is
urgent today.

Fourth, I discover an irony in
the anti-New Perspective reaction in specifically Reformed circles. The New
Perspective launched by Sanders and taken up eagerly in many American contexts
was always a reaction, not to Reformed readings of Paul, but to Lutheran ones
and the broader protestantism and evangelicalism that went along for the
Lutheran ride, particularly in its negative assessment of Judaism and its Law.
Had the Reformed reading of Paul, with its positive role for Israel and the
Law, been in the ascendancy rather than the Lutheran one, the New Perspective
might not have been necessary, or not in that form. For myself, it may surprise
you to learn that I still think of myself as a Reformed theologian, retaining
what seems to me the substance of Reformed theology while moving some of the
labels around in obedience to scripture – itself, as I have suggested, a good
Reformed sort of thing to do.

I end with a plea. I have lived
most of my life in and around evangelical circles in which I have come to
recognise a strange phenomenon. It is commonly assumed that Luther and Calvin
got Paul right. But often when people think of Luther and Calvin they see them,
and hence Paul, through three subsequent lenses provided by western culture.
The Enlightenment highlighted the abstract truths of reason over against the
messy facts of history; many Protestants have put Lessing and Luther together
and still thought they were reading Paul. The Romantic movement highlighted
inner feeling over against outer, physical reality; many have thence supposed
that this was what Paul, and Luther and Calvin, were really saying (hence the
knee-jerk protestant anti-sacramentalism). More recently, existentialism has
insisted that what matters is being true to my inner self, rather than being
conditioned by history, mine or anyone else’s; many people, not only Rudolf
Bultmann, have read Paul and Luther in that light.

At a popular level, this mess
and muddle shows up in a general sense that anything inward, anything to do
with strong religious emotion, anything which downplays outward observance,
must be striking a blow for the Pauline gospel of justification by faith. This
is as worrying as it is absurd. All these movements are forms of dualism, where
Paul believed in the goodness and God-givenness of creation, and in its
eventual promised renewal. Together they reinforce that gnosticism which is a
poison at the heart of much contemporary culture, including soi-disant
Christian culture.

It is time to turn away from
all this; to rub our eyes, and look clearly at the path by which we and our
culture have come. It is time to turn back again, following the old sola
scriptura principle, to the source and origin of one of the great doctrines
of the New Testament: that when, through God’s effective call (sola gratia)
in the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ (solus Christus), someone
comes to believe that he is the risen Messiah and Lord, God thereupon (sola
fide) declares in advance what he will declare on the last day when he
raises that person from the dead: this person is in the right, their sins have
been forgiven, they are part of the single, true, worldwide covenant family
promised to Abraham, the sign of the coming new creation and the counter-sign
to the boast of Caesar. Justification is ultimately about justice, about God
putting the world to rights, with his chosen and called people as the advance
guard of that new creation, charged with being and bringing signs of hope, of
restorative justice, to the world. Let’s put the justice back in justification;
and, as we do so, remind ourselves whose justice it is, and why. Soli Deo
Gloria! Having thus stolen Luther’s slogans, I thought I might end with
‘Here I stand’; but let me rather say it in Paul’s language. hode hesteka;
allo ou dunamai.